H-Diplo Roundtables, Vol. XIV, No. 29 (2013) - H-Net

H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XIV, No. 29 (2013)
United States—are addressed in detail in both of my Diem books; the principal difference
between them is that the later text covers a longer stretch of time and is aimed more
explicitly at an undergraduate readership.
That said—and perhaps it shouldn’t have been; again, I may have misread Goscha’s text—I
learned a great deal from his trenchant, wide-ranging review. I take his point about the
recent spate of superb articles and books on the 1954-62 Laos crisis, and it is true that my
limited language skills prevented me from reading Laurent Césari’s work and other cuttingedge
texts. Nonetheless, I did draw extensively on Arthur Dommen’s The Indochinese
Experience of the French and the Americans, a cinderblock-sized monograph that Goscha
rightly dubs the veteran journalist’s “magnum opus,” along with Dommen’s Conflict in Laos
and Laos: Keystone of Indochina. 2 These are among the most dog-eared, underlined,
highlighted, coffee-stained books in my library. Indeed, while rereading Universe
Unraveling for this roundtable, I caught an oversight that I am pleased to correct here: it
was Dommen who directed my attention to the notorious encounter between U.S.
Ambassador J. Graham Parsons and Prince Phetsarath, Laos’s revered elder statesman, on
May 29, 1957—a meeting in which, as I note, “the extent of Parsons’s remoteness from
popular sentiment in his host country became apparent” (109). Although I deal with this
confrontation more extensively than does Dommen, and while I ascribe greater significance
to it, his endnotes were what prompted me to examine the relevant memoranda. I
gratefully acknowledge his contribution. 3
Goscha contends that I depict a “rather too positive American view of the Republican
Vietnamese as being more warlike and manly” than the Lao, remarking that many
midcentury Americans ascribed traits like cowardice, sloth, and childishness to the
Vietnamese as well. Fair enough, but I would argue that the operative word here is “more,”
and that my claim about American assumptions is comparative. U.S. policymakers and
pundits of the Eisenhower era held all inhabitants of the former French Indochina in
derision; even Diem came in for his share of ridicule, with CIA operative Edward Lansdale,
his friend and booster, at one time describing him as “the eldest of the Seven Dwarfs
deciding what to do about Snow White.” 4 On balance, though, the Lao ranked lowest in the
estimation of Americans charged either with crafting U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia or
interpreting developments there for a stateside audience. An example that comes readily
to mind is Virginia Thompson’s study French Indo-China, which I address in Chapter One
and which served as a standard reference book into the 1960s. 5 Thompson, an Asia
2 Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and
Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Dommen,
Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, Revised Edition (New York: Praeger, 1971); Dommen, Laos:
Keystone of Indochina (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
3 See Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans, 335, 1055.
4 Edward Geary Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972), 159.
5 Virginia Thompson, French Indo-China (New York: Macmillan, 1937).
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